Meta Platforms Inc. is on a quest to secure Users from Scammers by Helping them Restore their Compromised Accounts

Meta Platforms Inc. is on a quest to secure Users from Scammers by Helping them Restore their Compromised Accounts.

Post Summary

• Like technology, bad actors fine tune their scamming techniques and continuously improve on the ways to steal your online identities, your financial informations and deprive you of your funds. 
• Large social media platforms are striving to augment defensive mechanisms. It's to mend a new wall against cyber attacks on individuals on the social media.
• Facial recognition technology has evolved to a trustable stage and now Meta is planning on incorporating facial recognition to secure your accounts. 
• In case, a user is hacked or locked out of the account by scammer's relentless attacks, facial recognition will help them regain access. 

 

    Celebrity imposter is a common scamming method to lure in gullible folks and scam them. With facial recognition, the mitigation will come in the form of quicker account recoveries in case malevolent elements on the web deprive you from accessing your online accounts. 

    Thousands of people on social media receive messages from celebrity impersonators. Majority will be sceptical and ignore those scams but that doesn't matter. When your favourite celebrity (impersonator) claims that the said celebrity has something special for you, a few people are bound to be the victim out of thousands. In this day and age, celebrities are more accessible to the public than ever before. Scammers are aware of that and rarely but surely, to some people their words seems like truth.

    Scammers build ridiculous numbers of fake celebrity accounts on social media. Impersonation is done to engage users with their shady content in the hope of convincing them to click on their suspicious and often dangerous external links. 

 

 

    With facial recognition in practice, all the images, text and video in the fake accounts will be cross referenced with the official celebrity accounts and if deemed violating the terms and conditions of Meta, they will be instantly blocked.

 

    Elon Musk's personal expert for financial advice has been victim of a deep fake ad on the Facebook soliciting money from innocent people in the name of investment. This article on BBC explains how the AI generated ad has calculated his facial features and good enough to fool many.

 

Facial Recognition by Facebook in 2021

In 2021, Facebook tried facial recognition for safety measures but soon they had to halt it because of societal concerns and lack of trust from the public regarding their data. Now After 3 years, Now renamed as Meta Inc, Facebook will implement it again with the claims of robust privacy and safety measures inducted into the system. Initially, around 50,000 celebrities' around the world will be put in the system to cross reference images, text and videos uploaded by scammers in celeb-bait ads. Celebrities will be notified and will have the option to opt out of the program from their account settings. With new safeguards and vows of never keeping user's data after the verification, Meta is sure to have found a workaround for the potential backlash.

 DeepFakes

Meta has to trample the ugly side of the internet, which is fake ads using deepfakes, which has been a running problem for some time now. 

Deepfakes are inherently a result of too much computing power available for masses. As an open source software, Deep Fake is accessible to everyone. As the GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) have become impressively powerful in the mid 2010's, what we could only imagine in terms of graphical computation is now possible. Deep fakes were used by youtubers, researchers and educators to show the potential of computing power for entertainment, revival of old media, remastering the old films and such but on the parallel, scammers honed their skills for impersonation and wrongfully soliciting money from the public. 

 

As the ads generated through AI, deep machine learning applications such as deepfake are becoming ubiquitous on Meta, the pressure to do something about it is building. 

 

There are legitimate ads, which feature celebrities, sportsmen and famous people but there is an ocean of fake ads with images of celebrity to deceive and sell their own products. Sometimes it's straight up scams, which goes against the Meta Inc. Policies.  

According to this Meta Blog Post, user safety matters the most to Meta. To ensure users control over their accounts, video selfie verification is being introduced. Users will have to open their camera and follow instructions given by Meta account centre to scan their faces from all angles. Meta has vowed to neutralise the cyber threats on their users by strengthening detection capabilities.